The three fascinating papers by Dick Helmholz, Jim Ely, and Mark Tushnet prompt me to ask, why was there so much talk among late 18th and 19th century American lawyers about property as a "natural" right and why has the language persisted today? More specifically, what work is the rhetoric of "natural property rights" intended to do? This is not the proper occasion for developing anything like complete answers to those questions, but I do want to offer three lines of thought that might begin to approach a fuller explanation of the puzzling persistence of natural-property-rights talk.

Ben Barros

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Do you know what conference this was presented at? The other papers sounded interesting as well.

Posted by: JB | Nov 9, 2006 7:39:30 PM

Per Greg Alexander, the conference was on "Unenumerated Rights," and was sponsored by the Univ. of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law. All of the conference papers, including the papers by Jim Ely, Dick Helmholz, and Mark Tushnet will be published in that journal.